One of the best aspects about playing an escape room in Utah, we've discovered, is how…read moreaccommodating everyone is, especially if we are playing in the middle of the week. This may be because it does take a while to drive from place to place, even with no traffic, and when you try to stuff a waterfall hike and lunch before your game, like we did, the chance of us mis-judging our arrival time is highly increased. Escape Boredom Games is a new business - only one year in business so far - we came across while trying to find a room to complement our hike to the Adams Canyon Falls, and because school's out, we wanted something light and not scary. Escape Boardom totally fitted the bill. Since our hike was scheduled for early morning, we thought (haha) that we had given ourselves plenty of time to get to the Lower Falls and then make it in plenty of time to our game. We did not plan on missing our turn and ending up at the Middle Falls instead! Well, happily, Salt Lake City is very, very well linked, and it was not a problem for us to call in to ask for our time to start 15 minutes later. Even happier, London, our game host, and her co-host, were able and willing to excuse our tardiness with no extra charge or cancellation fee.
It was very easy getting to the women-run Escape Boardom from Adams Canyon, and parking was fine. The three seats in the lobby around a cute Rubik's Cube table were cheerful and welcoming, and the all-gender toilet was clean and big. As expected, we were more than ready to start with our game once we arrived, so with no further ado, we were shown into Grandma's and Grandpa's house and it was lovely. It smelt fantastic and the room was cosy and bright, with arts and crafts displayed that were clearly works of love. We were allowed to take pictures in the room, which was just one reason we took longer than we did in solving our puzzles, if you believe it! Our time left was recorded on the TV in the room, which also served to deliver our unlimited hints.
Escape Boardom is what we call a 3-G (third-generation) room, where there were no combination locks, and only one lock with a key. There is an option on the web site to book for a "Challenging" experience for an hour and a half, but we had booked our afternoon at Grandma's for just the hour because we were a smaller group. In fact, the "Challenging" setting may have been just an extra hour rather than more puzzles or more rooms. The room is very puzzle-intensive, and we were looking for just that when we made our booking. The puzzles in general required concentration, strategy and logic skills. Some puzzles were extremely easy (where we didn't need any hints to solve) but we did think the hints provided for a number of the puzzles could have been clearer. For example, for Candyland (our least favourite puzzle), Jenga and the circuits, it seemed like the hint-delivery glitches were so we would be encouraged to continue for an extra hour at half off, especially since no one was behind us in the room. For at least one puzzle, we were given the same hint three times. We also heard things opening but had a hard time seeing what it was that opened - we could be in one room when the opening happened in another. Let's just say we were also more worn out by our hike than we had planned on - haha - but the "Normal" setting had us wanting more!
We did enjoy our time, and we managed to finally solve all the puzzles in 95:14, just shy of two hours, taking into consideration our hike before our game, fooling around taking pictures and just taking our time to enjoy the experience. We can't wait for Escape Boardom's new room in September and trying out other current rooms soon!
